This is a shot I took recently of Moonika, and I thought I would show you how I pulled it off.

Moonika and her friend Lisa are costume designers for the stage here in London, and they contacted me to take some shots of the new pieces they had made. We decided to head out into the woods out back of Lisa's house to see if we could get some Tudor-style shots, for those of you familiar with the recent bodice-ripping Showtime series.

I knew in my head what sort of shot I wanted:

I was looking for a shot of the setting sun coming in through the trees while the subject strolls through the woods. I would bring along my Alien B800 light to act as a fill for the obvious shadows which the setting sun would cast, and then balance it all out to maintain a natural feel. I chose to use a Strip Box modifier because I wanted the light to have a reasonable even spread across Moonika's whole length, head to toe,, rather than the fall off I would have had if I used a 1m softbox placed at head height. I could have got the even spread with a large 2m softbox, but then I would have had a lot of light spreading across the floor as well. The strip box gave me the most control.

Unfortunately, as you can see from this 'behind the scenes' shot, the weather wasn't playing ball:

No sun.

Flat grey skies.

Not to worry.

I positioned her with her back to the sun anyway to get at least some rim light and lightly filled from the front with the strip box.

I'll get to how I accentuated the light in the edit.

We had done a bit of walking around and Lisa had discovered a fallen tree. I asked Moonika to stand in middle and positioned myself so it created a natural frame to the image with her standing center frame.

I also knew that I wanted to imitate a medium format look, with a full length square cropped shot, and a shallow depth of field. No small task with a DSLR.

My equipment was as follows:

Camera: Canon 5DmkII

Lens: Canon 85mm f1.8

I knew this combo would give me the shallow depth of field I wanted, but there was a bit more work to do to get the shot I wanted.

Now follow my logic here. If I want the square crop and depth of field which a Medium Format would give, I could get close with a few stitched shots from my 35mm full frame DSLR.

If I shoot 3 portrait-oriented shots, at a low aperture, and then stitch them together and crop the image square, I should be able to replicate some of the feel and depth I'm looking for. So I lined up my first shot with Moonika sitting in centre frame, and then warned her that I needed her to freeze for 3 consecutive shots, including one left and one right of the centre frame, with a small over lap between each so that photoshop would have something to stitch. Here are the raw shots out of camera:

And here is the shot after stitching the 3 shots together and cropping:

So I'm closer to the framing and depth of field I want.

Back to the lighting. What sun was making it in through the cloud cover was still highlighting her from behind, including her hair and shoulders, but not nearly as much as I wanted. It still looked a little flat.

So with the lighting I wanted in mind I went to work in Photoshop.

There is too much to go into detail about here, and it's a bit technical in places, but let me list the steps I took and you may pick up some tricks:

I removed any obvious distractions with the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools.

I dodged the highlights to accentuate shape using a Curves Layer set to Screen, and masking it in.

I burned the shadows to accentuate shape using the Curves layer set to Multiply, and masking it in.

I then went to work on colour using a combination of Curves, Colour Balance and Levels to get the feel I wanted. In short I was looking to warm up the whole image, and introduce some cooler tones to the shadows to create some colour contrast.

I then used the Lighting Effects Filter to direct the light from the rear of the image. This layer only ends up being used at about 20% opacity but gives a nice starting point.

I then created a fake sun in the background using the Lens Flare Filter on two layers, one small one at the centre point of my proposed sun, and one larger at a lower opacity to give the light some depth. These layers were both masked using the Apply Image function so that they only applied to the highlights of the image.

I created some subtle rays for the sun by creating a curves layer with brightened mids and highlights, and boosted yellows, and then drawing rays extending out into the image on a mask layer. To blend everything I blurred the mask layer until I couldn't see any defined lines.

I burned the edges of the image to pull the focus towards the centre, again using a masked Curves Layer set to Multiply.

I boosted the Saturation of her hair with a masked Saturation Adjustment Layer.

I further corrected the colour, as before, to create more feel after completing the light changes.

To finish I sharpened the image using a High Pass Filter.

Here, once again, is the final image:

If you want to find out more about stitching images see my post on Bokeh Panoramas.

the Blog

Your first 10,000 photos are your worst.

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

This blog shows some of my first 10,000, and the lessons I'm learning on the road to being a well rounded, inter disciplinary photographer. I am setting myself the goal of getting out there and shooting personal projects regularly (outside of my work shoot schedule), and sharing the lessons I learn along the way, in the hope that it will aid in your own journey.